


Graffiti Hearts

by Signel_chan



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Crime Scenes, Crimes & Criminals, Detectives, F/M, Murder, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24627553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: The burned-out shell of a library and the scarred skin of Kyoko's hands have more in common than she'd think, especially in a world of soulmate tattoos where half of hers has been destroyed by fire. Little does she know that by trying to solve a crime for a friend, she'll be pulled into looking at her world from a new perspective.
Relationships: Kirigiri Kyoko/Naegi Makoto, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 55





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MythGirl02](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MythGirl02/gifts).



Two winters ago the abandoned library near downtown burned in the middle of the night, a fire that was extinguished about as quickly as it had started and that was otherwise unremarkable. The only reason Kyoko was able to accurately remember the exact date and time she’d heard about the fire was because she’d been called in a panic the day after, being told that there was a chance that someone had burned up with the building and that she needed to investigate, just for a friend. She’d ended up spending a lot of time in and around the library’s burnt-out shell, but she’d never found any traces of any people having been present when the fire had started, nor had she found any way to accuse someone of committing the crime (which didn’t weigh too heavily on her, the building hadn’t been used in nearly a decade at that point).

For over two years, whenever she would be in the area, Kyoko would peek inside what remained of the library, just to see if any new clues as to what had happened that bone-chilling night had made themselves apparent over time. She normally had no reason to do so, as not even her friend who’d first asked her to investigate it was willing to send her back in for a cold case, but she felt compelled to take a look around just to make sure nothing had changed. As far as she and the rest of the city knew, the fire was an act of arson that had happened in the dead of night, with no one arrested for the crime and no one actively pursued in connection with it, and that was how things seemed to be meant to be.

It was a late summer day when she found something interesting to note in her scant file for the fire, an etching on the sidewalk outside of the building’s still-standing façade, a note that made a claim that the arsonist was going to be back. “It only took you almost three years to want to come back to finish what you started?” she asked as she read the note over a second time, her eyes shifting from the note to the remains of the building. “I mean, perhaps finishing the destruction will get the city to do something about this eyesore, I can’t believe they’ve let it stand this long.”

Adjusting one of the gloves that she wore on her hands, Kyoko grabbed her phone once the glove fabric was tight against her fingers and snapped a few pictures of the note, just in case she needed to refer to them later, and she was on her way to her actual destination for the day. She’d been asked to step in as a last-minute substitute teacher at the school her dad was headmaster at, and even though she’d protested and insisted that her college education was not enough to be teaching people, he’d been relentless in getting her to go in. Her detective work could always wait until after the teaching had ended, even though with it being the first week of classes after an extended break she wasn’t sure how much teaching there really was going to be.

Being in a classroom of high school students who wanted to be there less than she did was awkward, especially since all of them had just started getting back into the swing of schooling and she wasn’t their actual teacher. “Miss Kirigiri?” one of the girls in the front row of the room kept repeating, sing-songing the name to the point that Kyoko wanted to throw down the books she’d been told to teach from and walk out. “Why’re you wearing gloves inside? Do you think we’re germy? We’re high schoolers, we don’t have ‘cooties’, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“I don’t wear gloves because of germs,” she replied, not amused by the question that had followed the incessant repetition of her name. “It’s a personal matter that I’d rather not—”

“She’s the headmaster’s daughter, we’ve all heard the story of what happened to her hands!” a boy from the back of the room called out, his snobbish and pretentious appearance making her memories flash back to someone she’d attended the very school with. “She wears the gloves because otherwise she would be showing off scars, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” the girl said, sounding pensive as she smiled weakly in Kyoko’s direction. “That must suck to not show off your hands. Especially since…that’s your mark there, isn’t it?”

“—we aren’t discussing this further.” Kyoko made a mental note to go chew out her father for divulging personal information to the student body without her consent, before hiding both arms behind her back. “Get out your books, we’re going to actually learn something to keep you all from pestering me.”

The students all grumbled and rumbled as they fished out their materials, and Kyoko made it a point to keep one of her arms hidden behind her as much as she could as she taught them and all of the subsequent classes, everyone curious to know about their substitute but her refusing to say much at all. True to her decision the moment she could, she was heading down to the headmaster’s office with the intention of telling him not to talk about her to students she’d never met, so that if she did meet them through circumstances such as her stepping in to fill a classroom without a teacher for a day, she wasn’t having her own life story recited to her. Jin Kirigiri wasn’t considered a pushover by the students at the academy, but when it came to getting called out by his now-adult daughter he could be easily convinced to see things her way, and after their sometimes-heated discussion she was able to leave his office with a dinner meeting and a promise that he wouldn’t tell everyone about her injuries again.

Weighing on her mind for the rest of the school day, Kyoko didn’t say a word to any students about any personal information, silencing anyone who tried to talk about her gloves or her hands with a silent glare and an order to get their books out. But when she was walking home, she was fixated almost exclusively on her hands, the black leather gloves not her usual pair that she wore but the ones she’d selected for the occasion, the fabric towards her wrists not going up as far as she would have liked. On her left forearm, visible up to the crook of her elbow, was an angular design that zig-zagged here and there down towards her wrist, disappearing under the glove before it met its end. That was the _mark_ the student had referred to, a tattoo-like design on her skin that she’d had since childhood, dark lines that would someday, maybe, come alight with color.

It was said that when someone spoke with their soulmate for the first time, the mark would take on the colors of their hair and eyes, changing with them as they dyed and masked their natural colors. Many people would compare visible marks if they could before they said a word, or they’d take risks and talk to people whose marks were obscured and hidden, but Kyoko wasn’t sure she’d ever truly get to know who her soulmate was based on her own identifying mark. Underneath the glove, the scarred flesh on the palm of her hand had replaced the end of the mark, which had at one point reached all the way to her first knuckle on all of her fingers. If she was unlucky and what she had left of it was merely one of the colors, she would never truly be certain who her soulmate was, unless she could see that their mark held her own colors.

All in all, it was a strange tradition that had to be followed, and Kyoko had been unlucky in the placement of her mark in the first place; based on how she spoke to many people on a daily basis and it had never changed color even as she’d become an adult, she felt that perhaps she was unlucky in that regard as well. Her walk home took her back by the former library, where the note outside had already been erased from reality, and she found herself thankful for having seen it before she’d gone to the school that morning. Home wasn’t but another fifteen minute walk from that point, but as she moved she decided that going home first wasn’t the choice she wanted to make and so she changed course, going to her office that was her second home instead.

There was a note affixed to the front door of Kirigiri Investigations that she’d put up the night before, alerting anyone who wanted her services that she would be unavailable that day up until late evening, and she ripped it off as she unlocked the door and let herself inside. If anyone wanted her to work for them, she was available for it, and she felt that she could use the distraction from what was still on her mind. Her office space was right inside the door, there not being much of a need for her to hide away when she was the only person employed at the building, and she tossed the sign into the trashcan beside her desk as she sat down in her chair, ready to look through anything she might have missed while she was out.

As usual, there were many missed calls on the office’s phone, as well as several emails that needed responses, all about different cases and what needed to be done in terms of investigating them. While she worked through listening to the voicemails she’d been left she was reading the emails, forwarding them to other detective agencies that would handle the jobs better rather than denying the people outright. Kirigiri Investigations specialized in murders and violent crimes, requests for helping solve a money laundering case weren’t something she should have been receiving.

There was one voicemail that she intentionally left for last, and once she’d gotten through everything else and had determined she had only two people to get back to, she listened to the final voicemail. It started with the male voice stating her name, then sighing and getting into the meat of the content: “I know you know why I’m calling you, and if you could get back to me as soon as possible I’d appreciate it. I need to know if you’ve heard anything about the case, you know the one.” That was all the message said, but Kyoko was completely expecting such a call, given what she’d seen that morning, and she wrote a note to herself to follow-up with that call after her actual work was done.

The two people she needed to call for potential cases to take on both answered her calls and were more than willing to arrange in-person meeting times the following day, and the quickness of solving those problems meant that she was at the point to needing to handle the other situation faster than she’d hoped. Still, there was zero reason for her to be afraid of calling the man back, not when she knew that she had nothing to tell him other than that there’d been graffiti on the sidewalk and that there still was no sign of a dead body anywhere near the burned-out library.

In fact, that was exactly how Kyoko broke the news to the person she called. “Shuichi, as interested as I know you are in his disappearance, the message on the sidewalk implies nothing in finding him,” she said immediately after her call was answered, not even waiting to see who was on the other side of the line. “There is zero evidence to support your claim that he died in there, and the message was merely about coming back to finish the job.”

“Somehow I knew you’d say that,” Shuichi replied, a solemn tone to his voice. “I just…how was I supposed to know I’d meet my soulmate and he’d disappear in the same week?”

Closing her eyes and trying not to think too much about how her frequent collaborator and fellow detective had been _oh-so-lucky_ in finding his soulmate, Kyoko thought instead about how unfortunate the timing on that had been. She’d been invited to hear the story many times, usually whenever someone began suspecting Shuichi himself for the disappearance of his best friend and would’ve-been boyfriend. “You wouldn’t have known that, not without being able to see the future.”

“Exactly. It’s coming up on three years now and we don’t know anything about what happened to Kokichi that night.” She could hear the hesitance in his voice as he’d said the missing man’s name, but all it did was draw her into thinking more about the story she’d heard of the days leading up to the fire—and the disappearance. Shuichi had started to lose hope in ever finding his soulmate and Kokichi, knowing that whoever was his would disappoint him, decided to suggest a pact between the two of them, to give up on fulfilling the soulmate thing if they were still without by the time they hit thirty. This decision had been made in their early twenties, and by no means was close to being fulfilled, when a lovely blonde had walked into Kyoko’s office arm-in-arm with _her_ girlfriend and had made a request for an investigation into something that Kyoko knew Shuichi specialized in. One thing led to another, and when the blonde met Shuichi for the first time the visible part of her soulmate mark, along her collarbone, turned to the color of Shuichi’s eyes, and he frantically rolled up his sleeve to show his turning yellow and pink.

Within a week Kokichi had disappeared, and no one knew what to assume other than that someone involved in that was responsible for the whole ordeal. Shuichi’s immediate guess had always been that the library fire was to cover up the murder, but Kyoko’s lack of finding a body seemed to make that implausible. She thought it might’ve had something to do with his soulmate, or the girlfriend she’d peacefully broken up with once they’d met each other, but it wasn’t right to accuse someone who seemed relatively lovely with something that made no actual sense.

“Kyoko? Are you still there?” Shuichi asked, and Kyoko remembered that she was still in the middle of a phone call, even if she was thinking about what had led to being there in the first place. After she said that she was, he awkwardly laughed. “I got worried that something happened, maybe whoever got him got you too, and I was about to hang up and go check on you. You weren’t at your office earlier when I was on lunch, where were you?”

“Oh, filling in for a teacher at Hope’s Peak. Just an average day in my life.”

There was a moment’s pause, before he had to ask, “That’s…not sarcastic, is it?”

“I wish it was, but no, I was actually teaching today. Can you believe how rude children nowadays are? They wouldn’t stop asking me about my mark.” Now, Kyoko knew very well that when she’d been a student she’d always been curious about the soulmate identifying marks of the people around her, but she’d never exactly asked someone about theirs, knowing that her own was damaged. She might have been a _bit_ more observant than the average student, though, and that did give her the upper hand in seeing the marks and guessing things about them, especially since both halves of a pair had the same mark. “But yes, that’s where I was, now why were you over here at lunch?”

“Came to ask you in person about the library. You know how much I don’t like doing this over the phone.” Another pause, this time with the receiver muffled as something had to have happened on Shuichi’s end of the call. When he returned, he seemed to be in slightly better spirits, even with what he’d just been talking about. “Sorry, someone just came in asking about their lost dog, I have to take this. We’ll talk again later, right?”

“Anything to put your mind at ease, Shuichi.” He hung up almost immediately and Kyoko let out a sharp breath, before slumping down in her chair. She thrived on solving murder cases, no matter how gory and desolate the scene was she found her calling in searching for evidence, and having to pretend like she could do anything about a missing man and his cold case took her right out of her comfort zone. Glancing at her computer she saw that in the time she’d been talking to Shuichi she’d gotten several more emails, and she set her phone aside and popped her gloved knuckles, mentally prepared to take on whatever cases people were trying to get her to agree to solving.

The emails were not case-related at all, or at least not related to new cases. One of them was an accidental send, unfinished and continued in the one that came after it, which was a thank you message to Kyoko for solving the murder of someone’s brother the previous year, a case in which the killer had just been convicted recently. Having someone thank her for doing her job made her feel good, but it also hurt her heart knowing that she was being thanked because she’d found who’d killed a man based on shoddy cleaning up of a crime scene, and that wasn’t something to be happy about. The other email was from another frequent collaborator, although this one wasn’t a detective like Shuichi, and it was asking when she’d be open for business for some friendly conversation.

Replying to that one felt pointless, but she told the sender that she was in the office right then and sent it on its way, only for the door to open moments later and a woman with long, deep-purplish-red hair came walking in with her hands covering her face. “Why did you ask me when I’d be in if you already were planning on coming inside?” Kyoko questioned, watching the woman scuttle across the room and find a seat in one of the many chairs usually reserved for people there for investigative reasons. “You could have saved yourself some time if you’d just come inside initially.”

“Y-you were on the phone and I wasn’t going to interrupt that,” the woman replied, not moving her hands from her face. “So I had Komaru type up a message and send it to you, and when you replied I came in. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Not a one, Toko, thanks for not barging in when I was on the phone. You wouldn’t know if it was important or not until you were in here, so…good on erring on the side of caution.” It was always best to be gentle with criticisms and heavy with praise when speaking to Toko, something that Kyoko was intimately familiar with after having known her since they were classmates in school. “Where’s Komaru, if she typed that message?”

“Outside on the phone, don’t you think it’d be rude if she came in talking to someone not here?” Finally dropping her hands, only to have them play with one of her ratty braids, Toko looked at Kyoko over the rims of her glasses, seeing the detective shrug and go back to looking at something on her computer. “Dinner plans. She’s making dinner plans.”

Kyoko’s eyes narrowed as she thought that announcement through, before she shrugged once more. “Doesn’t sound like anything I need to be involved in. I assumed with how you made sure I was here that you had something to say related to a case, not something as bizarre as…dinner plans.” She scrolled up through her email inbox, looking for a specific message that Toko had sent her days before, but she didn’t find it before realizing that she knew why she was being informed of the plans. “You want me to go with you two, don’t you? What, are you dining with a murderer?”

“Only every day of our lives,” Toko replied without missing a beat, the timidity that was usually present in her stumbling voice gone. “But no, tonight we’re eating with her brother and apparently he’s got some legal stuff he’s working through. Not…your kind of stuff, but do you see us being able to ask another investigator to a meal without being laughed out the door? I don’t think so!”

“You’re inviting me to dinner to hear out a work-related issue with Komaru’s brother, who I’ve never met in my life before this. Sounds romantic.” There was a split-second where Kyoko considered turning down the offer and reminding Toko that she wasn’t fond of working outside her hours in the office, but she figured that the worst that would happen was her having to shove the guy’s problems into someone else’s lap.

“Oh, I know that face you’re making.” A finger pointed in Kyoko’s direction, as Toko stood up to see the pensive, thoughtful expression that her friend was wearing. “You’re coming up with some way to end up not going, aren’t you? Just come out and tell me that you’re not interested, I won’t snap and kill you on the spot.”

Shaking her head to wordlessly show that she disagreed with the statement that she’d just heard, Kyoko stood up as well and came around the desk, showing that she was still wearing the clothes she’d felt she had overdressed in for teaching that morning. “I need to head home and change before I go to dinner, if I smudge this skirt I’m not paying to have it dry cleaned, and I may need this in case I get dragged into court soon.” The pencil skirt did look like it was kept in pristine condition, but it wasn’t a special-occasion piece by any means; however, Toko was not privy enough to Kyoko’s dressing habits to pick up on the deceit and accepted the excuse as the truth.

“Fine, whatever, I’ll send you the place once we know where it is. You dress up however you want, but keep in mind that Ko made me shower for this so it’s probably at least a bit of a big deal.” Instinctively Kyoko’s nose scrunched at the mention of Toko’s lack of hygiene, even though it had been brought up in a positive manner. “S-stop that! I’m clean, I promise!”

“I believe you. Don’t forget to give me where this dinner’s taking place, or else I’m not showing up and I’ll enjoy my night at home.” Toko promised that she would get the information to her as soon as possible and soon she was out the door, Kyoko checking to make sure she had everything she needed before she was off as well.

The fifteen minutes it took to walk home felt like they’d doubled, as Kyoko thought through her day thus far and how it wasn’t even over yet if Toko and Komaru were going to have their way. Graffiti at the burned-out library, teaching for classes she had no business being in, yet another call from Shuichi asking her to solve an unsolvable crime…and now a dinner meeting with some friends and someone she’d never met before. “I swear, by the time I get to lay in bed tonight I’m going to fall asleep right away,” she remarked after she’d gotten home and into her bedroom to change into something less overly professional. Her bed was tucked in the corner of the room, surrounded by piles of books on law and detective work, both fictional and true, and it was incredibly difficult for her to resist the call of laying down and picking a novel to skim through until she dozed off.

There’d be time for that later, she reminded herself, and so once she’d put on a less-formal skirt and a flowy blouse that covered her arms down past the tops of her gloves, she felt like she was ready to take on whatever rejection she was going to have to give at the dinner. Her phone, sitting in her purse by the door, held the key to getting to the meal, a message from Toko explaining that they were at a casual diner not too far from where she and Komaru lived, but for Kyoko that was still a decent way away. She had to reply to the message with the apology that she was going to be incredibly late, before fishing out her car keys and using the vehicle she usually reserved for trips out of the city for the sake of investigation.

As she drove, she couldn’t help but think more about the library and how strange it was that someone had chosen that morning, of all the days, to deface the sidewalk outside of it. Very few people in the city cared about the place, and even fewer had the stake in the crime that Kyoko had been given. It seemed almost fated for her to stumble upon that scene on her way to the school, but whatever reason that was for hadn’t quite clicked in her mind yet, and she had her doubts that it ever would. By the time she’d arrived and parked outside the diner, she’d decided that she was not going to put any divine stake into the coincidence and let it leave her mind.

The table that she was joining was right inside the door, two seats filled and two left empty. “Where’s the brother?” she asked as she drew her own chair, seeing Toko looking around anxiously while Komaru was busy on her phone, muttering things as she typed away frantically. “Did he cancel on you guys?”

“He got caught up in whatever has him here asking you for help,” Komaru replied, eyes still on her screen. “He won’t even tell me what it is, because it’s ‘not my business’, but if he’s going to bring it up with you here, won’t it be my business then?”

“I’d say it would be, unless he assumes he’s going to pull me somewhere private to discuss matters.” One of Kyoko’s biggest trigger points in her work was having to talk to someone private that wasn’t of her own choosing, because she’d been put into many uncomfortable situations under those exact parameters. “But we’re going to hope that I can’t be of service to him and that he has to go elsewhere to find his answers. Personal stake in matters and all.”

“Ko doesn’t work for you, though,” Toko pointed out, her focus finally falling on the table rather than the room around them. “I-I mean, neither do I, but—”

“It’s still personal stake because I come out to meals with the two of you. There, an explanation you can’t argue with.” The smug smile that Kyoko gave made Toko visibly recoil, while Komaru had to work to suppress a laugh at how their interaction had gone. “I’m not looking forward to being given a job by someone who’s probably heard all about me and my methods. What if he thinks I’m not worthy of the work? Has he researched who I am?”

Komaru set her phone down on the edge of the table and laced her hands together, resting them underneath her chin. “I suggested you to him, there’s not much reason for research. Makoto’s not going to distrust you though, so don’t worry too much about it. He just really needs answers for why…whatever is happening keeps happening.”

“Based on that, I can assume it’s not a murder, or even an attempted one.” There were still so many unknowns going into the meal that Kyoko didn’t want to address, because the last thing she wanted to do was make either of her dining mates feel upset about her attitude towards the situation. She merely had to make the best of what she had been given, and from there she could decide if it was worth pursuing further. “I hope that whatever issue he thinks needs to be solved by a detective, well, actually needs to be solved by a detective.”

“Makoto’s not dumb, either, he knows what needs to happen to get his problem solved.” Just like that, Komaru was picking her phone back up and resuming messaging whoever she’d been talking to, whether it was still her brother or someone else. (Although, Kyoko noted, it would be strange for her to have too many others to be talking to at that point, seeing as her girlfriend was across the table from her.) “He’s on his way,” she said moments later, answering the question no one had actually asked. “He’ll be here shortly. _And_ , while we wait for him, he said we can go ahead and start ordering.”

Toko huffed, sinking into her chair slightly. “No one’s come by the whole time we’ve been sitting here, we aren’t getting served until he’s at the table, I bet.” She sounded angered by the fact that they’d been overlooked so far, even though she was easily the one of the three who didn’t want to have to interact with the wait staff to begin with. Her mood only soured as people walked past them and were instantly greeted by servers ready to take their orders, and both Kyoko and Komaru could see the anger deepening in her glare every time she watched someone getting service.

Eventually, before she could make a scene about things, a tall, quite young man came up to the table, looking nervous as he brandished a notepad for taking their order with. The first thing Kyoko noticed was that he wasn’t making eye contact with her even as he spoke to her, and his stumbling over words lessened when he was speaking with the other two. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that child’s terrified of me,” she remarked once he’d walked away with their drink orders penned onto his notepad. “Poor kid, do I look that intimidating? Or do you think it’s something else?”

“He’s probably seen your face on TV before, and he’s starstruck,” Komaru suggested in reply, watching the boy as he disappeared into the kitchen. “That, or he thinks you’re cute and wonders if you’re his type.”

“We’re going to mark it as the first option.” Kyoko had never been fond of the fact that she was regularly interviewed when investigating crime scenes, because she always happened to be present when the media arrived. If the boy thought of her as some kind of celebrity, it would explain why he couldn’t look her in the eyes, even though she liked to consider herself down-to-earth. She heard a mutter about his appearance come from Toko and paid it no mind, but Komaru clearly did, kicking her underneath the table and making her yelp. “I really hope those mumbles weren’t about _killing_ the poor kid,” she said with a shake of her head, watching Toko bend down to rub at where she’d been kicked. “That would be unfortunate, seeing as I’d know you committed the crime.”

After making sure that she wasn’t bleeding, Toko gave Kyoko an eyeroll, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I would never do such a thing. You can’t prove I’ve killed anyone, ever, so m-maybe you shouldn’t accuse me of that.”

The staredown after that statement was what Komaru’s brother walked into, seeing the two women glaring at each other while she sat on the other side, burying her face into her folded arms. “Did I come at a bad time?” he asked, getting all three of them to stop what they were doing to look at him. “I can go and come back if you need me to, it’s no problem!”

“No, it’s all good!” Komaru chirped, shooting straight up in her seat to not give the impression that the women she was there with had started grating on her. “We’ve saved a seat for you, hurry up and sit down so you can get to talking!”

He laughed but did as he’d been told, greeting his sister and Toko both before looking across at Kyoko, who was sizing him up without much effort. “Er, I’m going to guess you’re Detective Kirigiri? I’m Makoto Naegi, I’m Komaru’s brother and here to ask you about getting your help with something weird that keeps happening.”

“Unfortunately I’m not qualified to give medical help,” Kyoko dryly replied, holding out a gloved hand for Makoto to shake, which he did with enthusiasm despite her attempted dig at him. “But go on, I’m quite curious about whatever it is you need investigated. I know Komaru is too, she seemed jealous that you were wanting to tell me.”

Stunned, Komaru snapped, “Hey now, don’t drag me into this!”

“It was merely stating the truth.” Even though she’d never met this man before (as far as she knew, and she was decently strong when it came to remembering faces of people she’d met), Kyoko felt a connection with him she’d rarely felt with anyone else. He seemed to be a bit out there in terms of his focus and intelligence, but he’d not stopped smiling since he’d shown up and he seemed to be incredibly jovial, no matter the situation. “Go on, Makoto, tell me what your problem is.”

The air started to get heavy over the table as they waited for Makoto to begin talking, but right as he seemed like he’d gotten all of his ducks in a row the server came back bearing drinks and ready to take orders for the main course. That distraction was a necessary one, but resulted in the process beginning anew once he was gone, Makoto having to arrange his thoughts a second time before laying them out for everyone to know. “Murder clowns. I have a problem with murder clowns.”

“Ah, yes, because that’s a completely reasonable thing to need a detective to solve. Problems with murder clowns.” It was almost laughable how strange that statement had been, but Kyoko made it a point to not laugh at people’s requests when they made them, feeling that invalidating what they thought was an important matter was not appropriate. Komaru was busting out in laugher and Toko’s straight face was breaking fast, but Makoto wasn’t paying attention to either of them—his eyes, his sympathetic gaze, was focused solely on what Kyoko was going to do. “Yes, well, you need to tell me more about these…clowns.”

Makoto nodded, still not paying any attention to the other two people at the table who weren’t taking him and what he had to say seriously. “They’re part of a group, I don’t know who or what they are, but there’s a bunch of them and they keep coming around vandalizing everything. Do you know how many times we’ve had to call maintenance to clean graffiti off the school building?”

“School? You’re a student?” In the back of Kyoko’s mind she was already working through what little information she’d been given, the presence of graffiti-slinging clowns causing mayhem, but the revelation that this man had associations with a school hit her hard. “I never would have guessed. What kind of studies are you in the middle of?”

“Education things, I work at a school for delinquent children. Have to get the proper licenses before I can do anything more than assist in the classroom, though.” Raising a hand to scratch right behind his ear, Makoto seemed to be slightly ashamed of that admission, but the eager nodding Kyoko gave him to continue was enough to convince him that he had nothing to be ashamed of. “It’s hard to tell the kids they can’t make a living committing crimes when criminals keep defacing the school, you know? Feels like we’re just teaching them lies.”

Tapping her fingers together, Kyoko thought about how she could approach the situation, and for the first, solid time she was certain that the problem she’d been presented with was one she needed to handle herself. “That would definitely be a conundrum, and one you need solved before a new generation of children are causing the same kinds of problems for others in the future. I’m not specialized in crimes of this sort, but I will do what I can to put a stop to these, ahem, murder clowns.”

“Why do you call them murder clowns?” Komaru cut in, still laughing but not nearly as much at what her brother had said as she had been. “This doesn’t sound like they’re doing much murdering. I could just show up with my megaphone and yell at them until they get the point to leave the school alone.”

“The graffiti talks about ‘murdering their leader’ and ‘silencing their voices’ and they draw a lot of clowns, so…murder clowns.” Even Makoto’s explanation of the name he’d chosen for the criminals seemed to be more thought out than dropping the name without explanation had been, but he didn’t seem to realize the issue with what he’d started the whole thing with. “Detective Kirigiri, I really appreciate you being willing to work with me on this. I’ll do anything I can to help you in solving this crime.”

She was already concocting a plan for how to approach everything, the details of which would have to be worked out later. “Thank you, Makoto. I’ll be in touch with you once I have the chance to get to your school to investigate the scene. For now, let’s put this all behind us and get ready to eat, hm?” It wasn’t always that Kyoko wanted to shy away from getting deep into the details of a case, but she knew that having two audience members wouldn’t be optimal in getting all of the necessary information, so she resigned herself to the fact that she’d have to get everything else through email or phone call some other time.

Their meal went over decently well, once their food had been delivered and the skittish server narrowly missed spilling his tray over the back of Kyoko’s blouse, and after they’d all had their laughs over the near-miss they were dining to their heart’s content. Things were cut short when Makoto’s phone rang and he had to bolt out to answer it, ducking back inside long enough to let them know that he needed to get back to the school to help with cleaning up yet another mess that had been made, and he threw down enough money to cover his meal before he was gone. Once he was out of the way, Kyoko made it a point to get home and out of public as fast as she could, doing something similar to how Makoto had made his exit by saying she needed to get back to her office to finish up some work, but buying her lie was harder when it was so late in the evening.

At any rate, she got out of the restaurant long before Komaru or Toko were planning on leaving, and she spend the ride home thinking about how she’d get to talk to Makoto again about things. In the whole ordeal she’d never mentioned getting his contact information, which meant she’d have to go through Komaru to get it, and second-hand was never the way she liked things being. She drove home and parked her car safely in the garage before entering the house, heading straight for the bathroom to take a shower to cool herself down before going to bed.

The sight of her bare palms always made her sick to her stomach for the first second she saw them, burned and scarred from a fire she was too young to know better to get away from. But her surprise at what else she saw when she took off her gloves was enough to make her forget about the scars, as the marked design on her forearm had lit itself up in a dark brown color she’d never seen on her skin before. “You’re kidding,” she said, tracing the new coloration with a fingertip that could barely feel what was underneath it. “But…who?”

Kyoko was a detective by trade, after all, she knew how she’d solve the problem in a split second; fortunately for her, she didn’t have to do much looking when the number of possibilities were so low, and the one that she could only hope it was would be someone she’d be in close contact with very soon.


	2. Chapter 2

Working as a detective in the city meant having a lot of locations that Kyoko only knew because she’d had to investigate a crime there before. She knew of all sorts of different neighborhoods that she’d never step foot in not on professional business, and she knew places that she’d never be allowed to enter if she wasn’t working; that usually meant that she kept her list of places she’d go short, just to keep out all of the places that she’d worked. Her normal job wasn’t being erased because of a bit of a “murder clown” issue, so she was still maintaining her normal schedule and her typical list of places she tried to stay away from.

That didn’t mean she was fully committed to keeping things normal until she was able to speak with Makoto again, though. She’d done her research into what he was talking about and found the school for delinquents he must have been working at, because the first search result that came up when she looked it up was about vandalism that kept targeting the school grounds. It seemed like a nice enough building, even though it was being used for something that people in the surrounding area must not have approved of, and she made it a point to drop by it the next time she was in the area.

Her opportunity came a few weeks after the dinner meeting, when she was given a case that involved a supposed murder-suicide where the details didn’t add up, and she found that the address for the home she was going to be scouting was right down the road from the school. If she had thought things through just a bit better, she would have realized that going to check out a school building while wearing her detective badge and carrying some of her investigation gear would have been a bad idea, but she’d been so focused on getting to do a preliminary investigation that the way she was presented slipped her mind.

As she walked onto the school property, she could hear the distinct sound of a power washer somewhere on the campus, and assuming that it was being used to wash off the day’s newest graffiti she went to search for the source of the sound. What she found was indeed a robot of sorts maintaining a hose that was blasting grime off of the side of the building, but the woman standing nearby the robot was a complete surprise. “Miu? Is that you?” she asked, hoping she had the name of the woman she’d met once before right in her mind. “What are you doing here at this school?”

“Came to test some security cameras they hired me to make, ended up using ol’ Kiibo there to help me clean things up for them, as a treat,” the busty blonde woman replied, waving a dismantled camera above her head to show Kyoko she wasn’t lying. “Who called the cops on me to get _you_ on my ass, though? Isn’t it bad enough that because of you rejecting us, you cost me my girlfriend, but now you’re gonna cost me my freedom?”

“I did no such thing, and am doing nothing of that sort either.” The fact that in sending Miu and her ex-girlfriend to Shuichi’s office had allowed two soulmates to meet each other had not been Kyoko’s intention in things, and the fact that she was being blamed for it years later made her feel uneasy about being on campus while Miu was present. However, she wasn’t going to waste an opportunity to get ahead on a case, so she approached the robot holding the hose with the thought of seeing if it held any information for her.

What she got instead was a camera hitting her in the back, Miu having lobbed it in her direction the moment she saw where she was going. “Back off from Kiibo, I’m borrowing him from the professor and if he catches even a scratch on him, it’s over for me! I’ve gotta get him back there in pristine condition so I can make some modifications to him, if you know what I’m saying.”

“No, I don’t know what you’re saying,” Kyoko replied, knowing that she did, in fact, know what Miu was saying, but not caring because she’d technically been assaulted by her in that action of throwing the camera. “Furthermore, I have no intentions of damaging your robot, I merely want to see if…he has any footage on him that could explain the graffiti.”

“Footage?” Miu repeated, before snorting. “He’s not been modified that much yet, I’ll get there after I get to the robo-dick. Right now he’s just good for following commands and cleaning up messes around here when the staff doesn’t do it their damn selves.”

Even with that in mind, Kyoko was still insistent on checking the robot for herself, running her gloved fingers across his metallic body and watching as his eyes looked to see what was there in his vision before focusing once more on his task. “Say, Miu, why do you have a robot on hand that can do this sort of thing? Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to keep your hands out of fixing their vandalism problem, just in case someone wants to decide to blame you for it?”

“No one would blame the gorgeous genius Miu Iruma for something so petty and dumb.” Stomping over in her heavy work boots, Miu was right behind Kyoko to pick up her now-shattered camera before chucking it back towards where she’d originally been working on it, only to drape herself over Kyoko’s shoulder. “Besides, the staff here know I’m around to help them out, they’re not a bunch of dumbasses. Well, most of ‘em aren’t, there’s one guy who comes out and always gets sprayed by the power washer because he gets in the way.”

“I see. What a shame that it’s you that’s here and not any of the staff, because I need to know details about the graffiti and—”

Miu pushed her ample chest further into Kyoko’s back, to the point that she must have nearly made herself flat with the pressure, which was no small task. “What makes you think that I don’t know details about it?” she asked, her voice sounding sultry in Kyoko’s ear, much to her dismay. “I’ve been helping them clean it up whenever I get my hands on Kiibo from the old man!”

Resisting the urge to knock her shoulder backwards into Miu’s throat to get her away, Kyoko maintained her professional attitude despite the uncomfortable situation. “Then tell me what you know, please.”

“Ha, you think I’ll do that? Sucks to suck at your job!” Cackling, Miu felt Kyoko’s body stiffen and she jumped back before anything could happen to her; Kyoko had decided that enough was enough and that she was going to take physical action to prevent further discomfort, but she was unable to do more than turn herself around and stare at Miu and her smug expression, the way she seemed to be baiting her to try attacking again. “I’m not going to tell you anything until you get my Kaede back, and that’s a promise.”

“Then we’ll leave it at this,” Kyoko grumbled, straightening out the sleeve of her shirt that the physical contact had managed to bunch up. “Have a good night, Miu, and stay safe out here. Word is that there’s a murderer on the loose.” Her straight-faced delivery, paired with her choosing to walk away from the school to head back home, was enough to get Miu begging for her to come back and “protect” her, but she wasn’t going to fall for it. There was certainly no love lost between them, even though they could have made decent partners in the detective field if Miu could think with her brain and not her reproductive organs for once in her life.

That night, after she’d showered and cleaned herself up after the work she’d put in (when she’d gotten home all she felt she could smell was Miu’s cheap perfume lingering on her hair), Kyoko found herself laying in bed with a crime novel resting on her chest, opened up to the last page she’d read the previous night. Some days it felt like she did nothing but think about her interest in the law system, whether it was for work or for pleasure, but in that moment she found herself thinking less about cases and more about the people who she’d met in solving them.

She was somewhere between thinking about the other detectives in town and her partnership with Toko (and Komaru, although less so) when her phone went off on the nightstand beside her. “It’s too late for it to be a work call,” she told herself, reaching for it to answer the call, finding the person calling to be from an unknown number. That alone made her wary of answering it, but she’d been called by some strange folks there in her bedroom and ignoring the calls often led to hateful emails come morning. “Hello?” she asked upon answering, trying to not show any of her apprehension. “Who is this?”

“Hey there, Detective Kirigiri. I hope this isn’t a bad time.” Makoto sounded just as jovial as he had in the restaurant when they’d met, and hearing his voice made Kyoko sit up in bed, her book losing its marked page as it tumbled off of her and onto the floor. “It’s late, I know, but Komaru just gave me your number and I figured I needed to give it a shot now.”

Biting her lip as she thought over the different ways she could handle responding to such a comment, Kyoko chose to go with, “I can understand wanting to call me, but couldn’t it have waited until morning?” His reaction was to stammer something before offering to hang up and try again in the morning as requested, but she rejected that at once. “No, Makoto, you chose to call now, certainly you can just get it over with.”

“You’re right, I can just come out and say it.” He gave a couple shallow breaths before laughing, finding something about his behavior amusing (and Kyoko, not knowing what else was going on, was confused at that fact). “An email got sent out about half an hour ago about someone fitting your description being on campus and harassing the person cleaning up some of the graffiti, and I knew right away it had to be you. Why were you there?”

Her expectations for what this call was meant to be fell through the floor after they’d managed to get up sky-high. “Is that what this is about?” she asked, the disappointment that this wasn’t just a casual call becoming quite apparent with each word. “I was merely in the area and decided to check to see the defacing for myself, but miss Iruma was there when I arrived and since she and I have a…history of sorts, she made it physical.”

“I knew it sounded like it couldn’t be the whole truth.” Sighing in relief that his chosen detective hadn’t been intentionally starting problems, Makoto continued, “It just seemed too strange that you’d be the one making a mess and then harming the person who we’ve hired to clean it up when we’re not around. You didn’t strike me as the kind of person to make crimes for yourself to solve. It seemed, well, kind of pointless.”

“Thanks for that vote of confidence, Makoto.” As irritating as it was that Miu would have the audacity to try framing her for some sort of misconduct, Kyoko knew that it was entirely personal and not done in any rational state of mind. “I suppose I shall save my investigation of the scene for some time you can be there with me, or at least, some time when she won’t.”

“I don’t blame you for that, we can’t have her on campus when the students are around because she’s not exactly the best influence on them, even if her skill with robotics and inventing in general would be amazing for the kids to see firsthand.” Makoto paused, and while he was silent Kyoko found herself wondering why anyone would want to willingly subject themselves to spending time with Miu, even if she did have some talents to bestow upon others. “Maybe you could meet me there in the morning? I won’t have any classes until afternoon so I can show you whatever work happened overnight.”

Without any hesitation, Kyoko replied, “I have nothing going on before noon, so you’ll fit right into my schedule. What time do we want to meet?” He rattled off a few suggestions, all of which were early hours that Kyoko knew she should have been in her office getting work done, but she selected one and they settled on that as their plan. Once the call was over and she was slipping back into her bed, she realized what she had just agreed to, and who she’d just agreed to be with, and she let out a long groan.

She was going to have to give Komaru a piece of her mind the next time she saw her, because this arrangement was on her head, all things considered. When she fell asleep, she did so to the thought of how she was going to tell Komaru that she’d accidentally introduced her brother to his soulmate, whether he knew it or not, and she was pondering the potential reactions to such a revelation when her eyes closed tightly. Her dreams, usually vivid and bone-chilling, easily able to be considered nightmares by anyone unaccustomed to them, were all related to domestic life, something she’d never seen herself getting wrapped up in. Kyoko had _always_ been a work-minded woman, she’d never cared about needing to find her soulmate or settling down, and the fact that one conversation post-learning that Makoto was most likely the one for her made her start rethinking her life goals was worrisome.

However, in addressing that she would have needed to remember her dreams longer than the first moments she was awake, because by the time she was dressed and heading out the door to meet him at the school all she could remember from the night’s dreaming was that she’d given up being a detective. That was definitely not something she planned on doing, though, so she wasn’t going to pay it any mind.

The school campus was much busier on her return to it, but there was only one person standing outside the building when she arrived. “I was worried I suggested something too early after that call last night,” Makoto admitted when he saw Kyoko walking up to him laden in her investigation gear. “You look like you’re used to worse, though, so maybe I was just overthinking it.”

“Perhaps you were.” Her words were spoken quietly, as for the first time Kyoko was able to see some of the graffiti on the building behind him, and all she could think of was how it matched what she’d seen outside the burned library perfectly. “Makoto, how long has this been going on?” she asked, brushing past him to get a closer look at the damage. “This certainly can’t be something new.”

“Longer than I’ve been around here for, but that’s all I can tell you. The murder talk started almost three years ago, though, that I know for sure because I was here when it changed over.” Joining her right at the outside wall of the building, Makoto pointed towards a scrawled line about how the person responsible blamed the institution for the death of their leader. “As far as we know, no one here or attached to here killed anyone around that time, so it just doesn’t add up.”

“Makoto, can I ask you something?” Without waiting for an actual response, Kyoko went into her question that she’d pieced together on scraps. “Are you familiar with the arson of the old downtown library?”

He furrowed his entire face in thought before giving a weary nod. “I think so, from a few years ago, where it just caught fire in the middle of the night?”

“That exact one. I’ve been attached to solving that crime, against my will, since it happened, and I can’t help but feel that this may be related to that in some way.” Pulling out her phone to take pictures of the scene as she saw it, Kyoko got in a few snaps before noticing a different spot of graffiti, which depicted a picture of a crude clown in black and white paint. “And this is why you call them the murder clowns, I assume?”

“Right, they draw that a lot. We think it’s their mascot, but why would they sign their work?” It was clear that Makoto was trying to solve the mystery alongside Kyoko, but he didn’t have nearly enough details to do it—not like she had many more than he did. “But go back, you think this is related to the library fire? How can you guess that?”

A choice had to be made in that moment, one that Kyoko had set up for herself the moment she’d mentioned the potential connection between the events. She could either reject Makoto’s curiosity and act like she couldn’t say a thing, or she could tell him what her hunch was and see if he had anything he could add to it. Neither was something she wanted to do, but she had to do one if she wanted to pursue any sort of relationship with this man; the choice she made was to look him straight in the face, purse her lips, and calmly tell him that she was merely making guesses and that he’d find the facts out whenever the general public got the chance to.

* * *

Normally if any of the local detectives were in each other’s offices, it was one of the others visiting Kyoko for something, so when she strolled into Shuichi’s office that afternoon with a grim expression on her face it was out of the ordinary. At least, it would have been had they not planned to have a sit-down meeting about the case involving Kokichi that day anyway, a coincidental meeting that happened to have perfect timing with everything else going on. The office was a lot darker than Kyoko’s was, even though the crimes solved within its walls were ones that held a lot less grime than hers did. “Shuichi, I need to pick your brain about something,” she told him as she took the seat across from his desk, where he had cleared everything off to keep himself free of all distractions while they talked. “It’s relevant to the case we’re here to discuss, I can promise you that.”

“Usually when you want to pick my brain it ends in us both getting frustrated that we can’t solve Kokichi’s murder, but I suppose I’ll go along with this,” he conceded after a few moments of weighing the options. “What can I do for you?”

The fact that he’d jumped right to talking about it as if they were truly in the throes of a murder investigation was not lost on Kyoko, who was prepared to approach it in a different way that day. “Kokichi was involved with a group before he disappeared. I need to know all you know about them, and don’t play stupid with me because this could be a key to solving this case.”

“What else is there for me to tell you about DICE? We’ve talked about them several times now and nothing matters in all of this. They wouldn’t kill him.” Tugging down on the brim of his hat to cover his eyes so that Kyoko couldn’t make eye contact with him, Shuichi grumbled a few things under his breath, hearing her impatiently tapping her fingers on his desk, before he admitted defeat and gave in. “They’re some kind of almost-cult, or at least that’s how they always acted whenever Kokichi would have them around. They’re not harmful though, just nuisances. Thorns in people’s sides.”

“Non-violent crimes, correct?”

“Pretty sure it was a rule in their ranks not to do anything directly harmful to others. Which is how I know they didn’t kill Kokichi, someone else did.” The confidence in Shuichi’s voice was heartbreaking, knowing that he was talking about the supposed death of one of his close friends. “So why did you need me to remind you of all that?”

Kyoko tapped her tongue to the roof of her mouth as she processed and worked through the angle she’d begun to take on the crime. “You’re correct in that DICE didn’t kill him, because they’re the ones responsible for the library burning down. That much I’m certain about. And because I’m certain about that…I can assure you he did not die that night.”

“Then what happened to him? A man doesn’t just disappear into thin air!” Now came the almost broken voice that she was used to having to hear when talking about this matter, as Shuichi was trying his best not to tear up at the idea that someone he’d considered dead for so long was still alive. “You can’t come in here and accuse his friends of burning the building where I know he died, Kyoko, not unless you have evidence to back it up!”

“Evidence, you say? Why, you’re the one with the connections with DICE because of having been so close to Kokichi, why don’t you reach out to them and tell them to tell you everything they know, or else you’ll have them reported for vandalism?” That was her kicker, her one bargaining chip that she could use to solve Makoto’s problem with the murder clowns and begin to find closure with that fire. She leaned back in her seat as she watched Shuichi’s face work its way through an emotional journey, before he mumbled something about doing that as soon as he could.

Her favorite part about being a detective, after all, was being able to solve crimes that people approached her with, and even though this one had never been a murder case she felt the same kind of happiness in her soul that she did when she put someone’s spirit to rest. Sure, she hadn’t found Kokichi (but with what she’d pieced together and told Shuichi, she believed he could do that in her place), but she’d figured out the issue with the murder clowns and she’d hopefully never hear another word about that from Makoto again. “And what if you’re wrong about this?” Shuichi asked, snapping her out of her happiness. “Then they’ll target me with whatever crimes they want to commit, and I’ll still have no idea what happened.”

“I’m not wrong about it, trust me. Getting answers from them will give you answers to where he went, that’s all I can—” The door to the office came open before Kyoko could finish her statement and she turned around to see Shuichi’s soulmate and fiancée standing in its midst, her hands on her hips as she looked at the pair in the room. “—oh, were you expecting her to come in?”

“What is _she_ doing here?” Kaede asked, a prominent pout appearing on her face. “I thought you were taking things easy today, I didn’t know a murder investigation was taking anything easy! What’s going on?”

“This was a planned meeting, it really is me taking things easy,” Shuichi replied almost immediately, motioning for Kyoko to stand up so that he could get her out of the office to put an end to everything. “She just came by to let me know about information relating to Kokichi’s disappearance, which you know isn’t anything too stressful for me to be working on right now.”

Nodding because it had all been the truth that had been said, Kyoko finally gave in to his wordless request and got to her feet, only to be nearly tackled by Kaede as she rushed over to her and grabbed her in a hug. “Thank you for it being you that’s here when I showed up, I was going to lose it on Shuichi if he’d lied to me about taking cases today. We’re supposed to work on a case for my parents today, and if he was working on other things then we couldn’t exactly get around to that.”

“Er, well, you’re welcome for it being me then.” Kyoko was trying not to make it obvious that she wasn’t comfortable with the physical contact, but she didn’t want to offend either person present. “I should be on my way, if the two of you have a case to be diving into. I’ll be in my office normal hours this week, Shuichi, if you find the need to talk things out further after what I told you.”

If he replied to that, she didn’t notice it, and the moment she could get Kaede off of her (the expression of appreciation and kindness was nice but not anything she enjoyed) she was out of that office and walking down the street towards her own. While she moved, she plotted out the rest of her day, barring any last-minute disruptions, and she came to the decision that she needed to call Makoto at some point to tell him that she should have handled his clown problem without any sort of confrontation. But calling him was a different sort of commitment that she wasn’t quite ready to go through with, and so she set that task as a low priority on the list of things to do, and because of that she didn’t get around to it that day, or the day after, or even after that.

It had to be Komaru to bridge the gap between her brother and the detective, even though the gap had been created solely out of a lack of remembering to get things done. She wasn’t afraid to send Toko into the thick of the situation to get things done, and that was what Kyoko was greeted with one morning when she got to work, a dark-haired sometimes-murderer sitting outside watching for her to approach. “Ko has a message for you,” she said in greeting, not even waiting for Kyoko to acknowledge that she was there before she went ahead with speaking, “and you better get around to getting it from her before she comes to you herself.”

“This isn’t suspicious at all,” Kyoko replied, unlocking the office door and not even looking in Toko’s direction. “Any idea of what it pertains to?”

“Something about you ghosting her brother.” Those words sent a shiver down Kyoko’s spine as she realized for the first time that she’d never gotten around to calling Makoto like she’d intended, and she knew that she was going to be in hot, deep water with her friend the first time she called her. So, rather than try to explain herself or even make an attempt to get out of needing that message relayed, she slipped into the now-open office door and shut it tightly once she was inside, locking it so Toko couldn’t follow her.

From there, she pushed aside all of her responsibilities and went into the back room of the building, where she kept all of the case files she maintained just in case she needed them, only to lock that door and trap herself inside. What was on the walls and shelves around her didn’t matter in that moment, she only needed the space where she was alone and could process her thoughts before she did anything that she would instantly regret. “First step should be telling Komaru that I did not intend on forgetting to reach out to her brother, and then after that should be waiting until he’s off of work to contact him. From there, I’m not sure, but those would be good places to start.”

Yet even with the plan in mind, Kyoko couldn’t bring herself to take any action. She sat in the middle of the room and looked around, eyes scanning over the different files that she’d kept in safekeeping for years. Somewhere in the room were the documents for the first case she’d ever taken on, a brutal murder in broad daylight that the police had been stumped on until she rolled in and was able to piece things together based on evidence that had been otherwise overlooked. That was a good conversation starter, explaining to someone that she’d outsmarted the police as a teenager, but she hadn’t seen those files in years and only knew they were still in the room because they’d never left it since she got the office.

Eventually she pulled her phone out and sent Komaru a message explaining herself, keeping it short and sweet and not expecting much as a reply anytime soon. If she was to get any response at all, it certainly would be about locking Toko outside without warning, rather than relating to the apology. That was a bridge she could cross later, though, and it wasn’t one that she was exactly eager to ever have to get across. Surprise washed over her when she nearly immediately got a message in return, telling her that it was fine and that no harm had been done, because she’d been certain that she would’ve been in for a chewing out from Komaru, and she was just stunned enough to drop the phone and forget she’d been sent anything that could have used a reply.

The time Kyoko spent there in her storage room was relaxing and calming, even if it was keeping her from doing her actual job and making differences in people’s lives. Eventually she stood up and began looking for specific cases to go back through and wonder if there was anything that she could’ve done different about the outcome. Several cases she’d gotten herself caught up in had gone cold, even with her insistence on doing everything she could to potentially solve a murder, and if she could change even one’s ending she would have given up everything to do it, from missing kids to entire families destroyed by some sick freak with a taste for blood.

Her final act before she left the room was to look through the file closest to the door, which she’d reluctantly put in the room in the first place. It was her collection of information relating to Kokichi’s disappearance, which she’d always known hadn’t been a murder by fire but now she was solidly convinced that it hadn’t been a murder at all. “I hope Shuichi gets some closure with you,” she said, flicking the manila folder holding all of her notes together. “It would be fitting that you appear back in his life as suddenly as you left it.”

Stepping outside of the room and seeing that there wasn’t anyone visible outside her door, Kyoko went to take a seat at her desk but found herself frozen in place a couple steps away from her chair. Something was not sitting well with her, and she couldn’t place her finger on what it was; right as she began to look around for any sign of someone being inside the building with her she felt the soulmate mark on her arm begin to tingle and without thinking she ripped the glove off of her hand to bring it fully to the fresh air.

The brown lines were barely visible underneath the burning-hot redness that she could see covering her arm from elbow to fingertips. “What is _this_?” she sputtered, taking her other glove off to see that the same was not happening on that arm to the same extent, although there was the beginning of some redness starting on the scarred palm of her hand. She was looking between her arms and resisting the urge to scream and start scratching in an attempt to relieve the discomfort she was starting to feel. “I could’ve sworn I didn’t touch anything abnormal today, and the gloves…those were fresh from the closet. There’s no way I’ve done something to warrant this sort of reaction.”

It was in that moment of panic seeing her arms aflame for the second time in her life that Kyoko realized she’d never grabbed her phone from the floor in the other room, meaning that she was going to have to either go back and get it, or she was going to have to reach out to someone some other way. The thought was there to go and get her phone, but she didn’t know who she’d call for any sort of advice about things, so she decided to not waste time and instead go for what she had handy. Her work phone had several numbers on auto-dial, and without any thinking about what the person on the other side would be able to do, she called the detective that she was often in contact with, expecting him to answer her and try to strike up conversation about a particular case.

She tried twice before coming to the conclusion that Shuichi wasn’t the way to go, and due to her hands and arms becoming more unbearable by the second, she couldn’t keep trying to reach out to him. The other detectives in the area didn’t answer their phones either, and that left her without anyone to call. Franticness beginning to take root in Kyoko’s otherwise logical mind, she decided that she’d have to handle things herself and she took herself into the bathroom of her office, running her arms under cold water to see if it dulled the pain. As the water rushed across them giving her relief, she audibly sighed, before wondering what could have caused her to have such a reaction. Racking her brain for any possibilities, the one thing that she kept going back to was something being laced on one of the case files and seeping through her gloves and into her skin, but that didn’t make sense. No one was ever in that room aside from her, and she would never intentionally set up such a trap.

Unless…it wasn’t intentional, and she’d gotten exposed to whatever was causing her physical distress elsewhere. In that instance, the only reasonable explanation was that she’d managed to soak her gloves in something harmful and it had taken until then for a reaction to take hold. It made a lot more sense than her having a deadly case file in storage, but at the same time it raised many questions. But just as she was starting to convince herself to look into that, she gasped and looked down at her arms, noticing that the worst reaction was on the palm of the hand she’d touched the doorknob with. “Toko must’ve slipped into her murderous state and set a trap for me,” she concluded, groaning at how her alignment with a serial killer of sorts had done her in. “I’ll have to tell her that she is not welcome around here again if she decides that’s how she will act.”

If that could have been the final answer to the problem, Kyoko would have been a happy woman, but once the ugly redness had faded from her arms and she could get out from under the water, she knew that she needed to clean the door before someone else tried getting inside. By that point she’d been at the office for hours and hadn’t been disturbed, so the chance of someone having been by was unlikely, but she could only imagine the bad press she would get if someone touched a tainted doorknob trying to get in to see her. She was slightly too late on figuring that out, though, because when she’d gathered the necessary cleaning tools that she had around, she saw someone standing on the other side of the door.

Not just someone, it was Makoto.

* * *

They found it within themselves to be able to laugh about the near-miss Makoto had with having a painful reaction on his skin, but only after Kyoko was able to explain why she opened the door on her side screaming for him to back away. He’d initially been very confused for her break from stoicism, but when he saw that she was brandishing rags and cleaning solutions he did as she demanded and held off from any judgments until he was able to talk it out with her. “Komaru’s told me all about how weird Toko can get sometimes, I’m not really surprised she turned it on you this time,” he admitted after the door was cleaned and they were inside the office, him taking a seat in the spot Toko usually claimed while Kyoko paced around, her arms tucked behind her back in shame of Makoto having been able to see them the whole time. “I wonder what you did to set her off.”

“With her, who knows,” she replied, running through every possible slight she could have made against Toko, before shrugging. “It would not come as any surprise that she did this on your sister’s behalf, to get back at me for forgetting to speak to you about the ‘murder clown’ case I presume has been taken care of.”

“Yeah, uh, about that, they haven’t been around in days and I think that whatever you did, you really got them to stop. You’re a timesaver, Detective Kirigiri. I don’t know how to thank you for what you’ve done.” As amusing as it was that Makoto didn’t claim that she’d saved his life, she knew that she couldn’t take credit for whatever had happened because she’d given the resolution to Shuichi so he could handle it.

Instead of telling him that, though, she picked out a different part of what had been said to call attention to. “You can call me Kyoko, I’m not expecting you to maintain a level of professionalism with me.” As she spoke, she pulled one of her arms out from behind her to gesture with, and she’d only noticed after the fact that she’d taken out the one _with_ her soulmate mark firmly etched into her reddened skin. His eyes had naturally been drawn to the presence of the arm, and she braced herself for whatever question was to follow, whether it was about her mark or the scars.

“You’re not wearing your gloves I hear you always wear,” he pointed out, shocking her because that was such an innocent thing to notice, but before she could explain why that was and refer back to the incident with the door, he got up from the couch and came to her, grabbing her hand in his and touching the remnant scars on her palm. “I’m not going to ask you what happened here, because that’s not my business, but is it why you always wear your gloves? It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Y-yes, that would be why,” she replied, feeling the tenderness of his touch on her hand and not immediately recoiling at the contact. The last time she’d allowed someone to touch her scars in such a way had been when they were still in the healing process, and the physical therapist had been working her damaged tendons and ligaments and whatever else to get them back into proper order. “I just feel that not wearing the gloves invites people to ask invasive questions, and I would prefer people to not waste my time with such things.”

He nodded as he accepted her words, before taking a glance at the brown mark that covered her forearm, only to shy his eyes away from staring at it too much. “I see you’ve found your soulmate, I probably should…stop doing this then, huh?”

“What? No, Makoto, why would you think such a thing?”

He was already pulling his hands off of hers, trying to back away. “It’s all the same shade of brown, it’s…not my place to be here being friendly with you like this,” he explained, hints of genuine sadness in his voice. “I don’t want you to send whoever they are after me.”

“Please, don’t speak like that. You don’t understand the whole story. You’re perfectly within your right to hold my hand like that.” The idea of telling him that she suspected he was her soulmate crossed her mind, but Kyoko knew that she needed to explain something else before she got to that. “Didn’t you notice that the mark blends into my scars? You can’t see the whole thing, the other half of it was burned away.”

It was too little, too late with Makoto, as he’d already gone back to the couch and wasn’t paying her any attention. “I should’ve known that trying to get close with you was a bad idea, you just seemed like such a great woman and since I’ve been looking for my soulmate still I thought…hey maybe…”

“Makoto, where is your mark?” Words spilling out of Kyoko’s mouth faster than she could think of how to handle addressing what came after them, she nearly leapt to standing in front of him with her arm exposed. “I never had color in this until I met you, after all, so I’d like to know if perhaps you’re the reason it looks this way.”

“It’s on my side, along my ribs. Komaru used to always joke that I got off easy, because it’s a nice design and that it’s somewhere easily hidden.” He motioned towards the general location that he was speaking of, and Kyoko beckoned for him to stand, only to grab the hem of his shirt and pull it up without asking for consent on the investigation. Makoto yelped and tried to prevent her from partially undressing him, holding the shirt down despite her trying to expose his skin. “What are you doing?” he loudly asked, looking at her determined expression as she kept trying to get the shirt off. “I don’t think it’s necessary for you to see it right now!”

“Please, humor me on this. You said you wanted to get to know me, after all, and since meeting you brought color to my life, it feels plausible that you meeting me brought color to yours.” Her persistent tugging was enough to get him to throw his arms up after a few heated seconds, and the moment that the side of his chest was exposed Kyoko knew she’d hit the jackpot in her insistence. The design painted on his body looked similar to her own, except in an extended form that she’d lost long before, and she was willing to guess that if she compared it to what she had they would look identical minus the missing parts. That wasn’t as important as the color was, and the fact that it was lined with purple, both light and dark, that matched her hair and eyes, told her that she’d been right all along. “Makoto, how long have you known about this?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied, “and I’d prefer it if you’d let me have my shirt back on again.” They didn’t speak more until he was properly dressed, having a firm grasp on the edge of his shirt so that she couldn’t take it off a second time. Kyoko had expected that once he’d gotten his wish he would’ve opened up about how he had to have known they were soulmates, but he sat on the couch in silence, staring past her as if she wasn’t even there.

When she finally sat down next to him and offered him her arm, he tenderly took her hand again and resumed the massaging he’d been doing before. “I want to know why you haven’t mentioned this,” she said, knowing that the air between them was bound to be awkward at that moment. “Is it that you have someone else waiting for you at home? I can assure you that I’ve been single my entire life, waiting for this moment if it ever came.”

“Komaru hasn’t mentioned that, huh?” Makoto chuckled, giving Kyoko’s hand a squeeze right between two of her fingers. “I’ve had a few girlfriends here or there but none of them ever really stuck. One got roped up in fame, another in military drama, and since I never met one whose mark colored in when she met me, I figured maybe it was best I didn’t try. But then my sister, who really only wanted the best for her older brother, sent me a picture of your arm and told me she’d met someone she thought I needed to meet.”

“Hence coming to me about your ‘murder clowns’, I get it.” Kyoko was impressed that Komaru had put together such a complicated plan, but she’d really had all the pieces given to her and she interacted enough with people who solved crimes (or committed them, in Toko’s case on occasion) that she had to have picked up some of the skills to reverse-engineer a mystery to solve. “Funny how we met over something so bizarre, yet it brought us to each other _and_ it brought closure to a completely unrelated case.”

“Yeah, that is kind of funny, now that you mention it that way.” They fell silent as they sat there together, his hands rubbing on one of hers, and for the first time in their lives they knew that the person next to them was someone that they were intended to spend the rest of forever with, so filling the silence wasn’t going to be necessary. Of all the ways to find one’s soulmate, Kyoko had really lucked out on hers coming into her life through the job she’d devoted herself to, and Makoto had been lucky that she knew his sister.


	3. Chapter 3

Six months later, Kyoko was sitting in her office doing her daily check of her emails, reading through the positive messages in regards to her handling of a high-profile murder case she’d taken on a few months prior. She’d managed to find a forensic gold mine that turned the tides on a conviction, letting an innocent man go free while the murderer was caught after being convinced he was going to get to murder again. With every further message praising her competence and insistence on doing things by the book she found herself smiling, her heart beginning to beat faster as she started to worry if this was going to push her into a higher standing within the detective world.

“Uh, Kyoko, a moment?” Shuichi’s voice asked, and she looked over the top of her computer to see her friend and fellow detective standing there, his hat in his hands as he was wringing it. How he’d gotten inside without her hearing him, she wasn’t sure, but he was there and she had no reason to deny him conversation. She nodded and he sat down, setting his hat on the side of her desk to keep it from being a distraction. “The interim leader of DICE came to visit me today,” he said, and she knew from that one statement that this conversation was about one specific case. “It was quite the interesting talk we had, and now I can throw something at you that you’ve managed to overlook.”

“Me, overlooking something?” she repeated, slightly incredulous at the insinuation, before laughing. “I’m reading through emails about how I never miss a clue and yet you’re here telling me I missed something? Well, get on with it, Shuichi. What is it?”

“According to her, Kokichi was in the middle of some legal trouble when he disappeared. I had no idea he’d ever been so wrapped up in the law that he could be in actual trouble, because he always told me that his affiliations with DICE would cover him, but…turns out, that was another one of his lies.” As he spoke, Shuichi seemed to be leaning forward, to the point that when he’d finished his head was almost resting on the desk in front of him. “Therefore, his disappearance may have been to cover his tracks in that regard, rather than anything bad happening to him.”

Kyoko’s eyes shifted from side to side as she ran through all the possibilities that opened up in their solving of the case, before she was rushing to search something on her computer. “I suppose my first step here would be to look through the court’s files from around that time, to check for anything he may have been attached to,” she explained, to justify her clicking and almost immediate typing. “That would give us the why for his disappearance, but not the where, unless…”

“Unless he was arrested that night, and that’s where he went.” Popping back up to sitting tall, Shuichi pulled his phone out from his pocket and found a picture on it, offering the device to Kyoko while she was in the midst of her archive searching. When she grabbed the phone from his hands, she noticed immediately that Shuichi seemed to have already done research of his own, finding a booking for one Kokichi Ouma for the very night he’d disappeared, although the name’s spelling seemed to be smudged. She stopped searching immediately and looked over at Shuichi with her jaw hanging slightly, him unable to resist giving a breathy laugh in return. “I know, I got so wrapped up in the idea of him dying that I didn’t consider there could’ve been more to it.”

“Whatever he did, he must have deserved the jail time.” Handing him back his phone, Kyoko resumed her search long enough to find the records relating to what she’d just found out, and much like the connection between the defacing of the school and the people in DICE, the connection between Kokichi and the events of the night he’d gone missing became clear. “Arrested for breaking probation, violating a restraining order against a business owner, and, get this, _arson_.”

They both paused whatever thoughts they had in that moment at the reveal that the man they’d been looking for had been somewhere easy to access all along, and as Kyoko found herself going back to reading, Shuichi was shaking his head, not in anger but in disbelief. “I just don’t know why he didn’t think he could tell me about his legal troubles. Why would he assume that going out that way would be better for him?”

“Think about it, Shuichi. He’d just lost his pact with you, because you’d met the girl you were meant to be with, and he knew he was going to jail for some things he’d done. Why not go out with a bang or…in this case, a burn?” The arson mentioned on the booking was the burning of the library, which did mean that all along he’d been connected with the event, but not in the way that they’d been led to believe. Kyoko was enthralled with everything she now had at her fingertips, but she knew that answering all of the questions they’d had for so long was only going to unearth new ones.

Ones that would have to be addressed at a later time, she knew, as she heard the door to the office open and she looked up to see who was coming in. It was Makoto and Kaede both, walking in with insistence in their strides and gaining immediate attention from the two detectives. “When was I going to learn that you guys knew Makoto?” Kaede asked, bubbly and laughing with her words. “I’ve had to teach piano at the school so many times, we’re like…sometimes work buddies now, right?”

“Sorry, I didn’t know that she’d be so surprised to learn I knew you two that she’d walk me out of the school for an ‘extended mental health day’,” Makoto added, winking in Kyoko’s direction but having his rather shoddy display noticed by all present. “I tried fighting her to stay at the school but she insisted we get over here so she could prove that she knows you both as well.”

“Uh well, if she’s here then perhaps I should go for now,” Shuichi said, standing up and finding a hug from Kaede as a greeting from his dearest fiancée.

Seeing them wrapped up with each other made Kyoko crack a smile, and after goodbyes were exchanged they were on their way out and Makoto was taking the seat he’d vacated. “I may have lied there, I’d already asked for the afternoon off so I could come by to talk to you about something.”

“It wasn’t obvious at all that you were framing Kaede for your own decisions, but go on.” Closing out the browser where she’d still been looking at Kokichi’s somewhat impressive rap sheet, Kyoko even moved her computer to the side so that she could look Makoto straight on, seeing the playfulness in his eyes. “What is so important that you figured coming to speak to me about it was a better use of your time than working?”

“Harsh as always, Kyoko,” he replied, reaching for one of her gloved hands, which she offered to him without any hesitation. “Komaru’s been nagging at me about something I was supposed to do months ago, and I figured that waiting too much longer would possibly get Toko on my case, and the last thing I want you to have to do is solve _my_ murder.”

With her other hand, Kyoko motioned for him to speed things along, loving getting to have the idle banter and discussion but knowing that there was meat somewhere within his words. “Toko has been exceptionally well-behaved in the past few months, her hands have been out of most murders in the area, and there have only been two copycats I’ve had to put to justice in her absence. She wouldn’t murder you.”

“True, true, but then, uh…” Trailing off, Kyoko could see Makoto’s face turning redder by the second as he thought about what it was he needed to say to her. She almost wanted to needle him into hurrying up again, but then he spat out, “I need a plus-one to their wedding in a few weeks and I was hoping you’d be it.”

“Makoto, I’m flattered you’d ask me this, especially given that we’ve been _casually_ dating for a while now,” she answered, unable to restrain her amusement and letting out a couple soft laughs, “but you’re forgetting a crucial part of things, and this is definitely why Komaru has been getting on you about it.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“I’m going to be in their wedding. I’m officiating it.” Seeing the way that Makoto broke into loud, awkward laughter at her rejection was almost too funny to ignore, but Kyoko wasn’t quite sure how they’d gotten this far without him knowing that key piece to his sister’s upcoming wedding. Naturally, when Kyoko had first been approached for the position she’d been skeptical of how serious the request was, but she’d learned to embrace it as she’d gotten familiar with the ordainment process and understanding that they wanted her because she was one of the few people involved in law that they could tolerate.

This had been news to Makoto, however, and once he’d recovered from his minor breakdown he looked at her with relief in his eyes. “I assume that means that we’ll be going separate but we can hang at the reception, right?” he asked, a question to which she did not have an answer at the moment. “Oh well, I’ll let Komaru know I’m going by myself because of this, she’ll know I know then.”

“Yes, that might be the best course of action.” The wedding was still months out and there was still a lot to do before Kyoko would find herself confident in her role as officiant, but she’d been looking forward to the day finally rolling around. “At least not having to coordinate outfits with me means you can choose to be a bit more wild. Express yourself, your sister should hopefully only be getting married once.”

“It’s still weird to think that my younger sister is getting married before I am.” Makoto seemed to have spoken without thinking about who his audience was, because his face lit right back up after his sentence had concluded, and he quickly averted his gaze from anywhere Kyoko could meet it. “N-not that I’m wanting us to rush into things, it’s really just that Komaru’s younger than me, but she’s known her soulmate longer, and that just seems weird to me.”

Nodding in understanding (and only slightly getting flustered herself over the whole thing), Kyoko said, “I would say she’s rushing into things herself, but that’s neither here nor there. She wants to know that she and Toko have each other for life, that’s her decision to make. She isn’t the only person soulmate-assigned to a murderer who’s jumped into this sort of thing in recent memory, and she certainly won’t be the last around here.”

“You’d know that sort of thing better than me, you’re the one who knows who all kills and who all is allowed to get away with it.” Relaxing again, Makoto seemed to be in good spirits even with his blunders he’d made, and it made Kyoko feel at peace seeing him rolling with the punches and still having a good time. If only he knew the truth of the dark underbelly of the city, with the frequent murders that happened under the banner of being “good” for society, where the people guilty were given free passes just because of whoever they were connected with, then perhaps he wouldn’t be as thrilled to be associated with her. She knew that he knew all about Toko and her other side, but she could have easily chosen to bring up a dear friend of Shuichi’s who was even more brutal with her killings and yet got to roam free because of her choice in targets.

She refrained, though, because she loved her soulmate and she didn’t want him to see her in any other light than the one he shined on her daily. “I suppose I’d know that better than you, yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that you know about it to some extent. That’s much more than most people can say, and those are the people who love to claim they’re familiar with the way the world works.”

“No one really knows how the world works, if they did they’d know how you get your soulmate assigned to you in the first place. If our parents knew that Komaru’s marrying a murderer, they’d kill both of them for it, but they don’t know and they act like they don’t know anything about people killing each other around here.” Letting go of Kyoko’s hand, Makoto pulled himself forward in the chair, getting a closer look at Kyoko’s face. “They also don’t exactly like that I’m wrapped up with a detective, but they’re more worried I’m going to lose you to job violence than anything else.”

“A valid fear, honestly. I’ve had enough knives drawn on me at crime scenes to feel like I’ve escaped death more times than one person should.”

“I’ve had knives drawn on me too,” Makoto pointed out, “but that’s because of the kind of school I work at. Someday I’ll get to teach somewhere a bit safer, but that’s not happening anytime soon. Can’t leave them when I’m just getting to know them.”

For a split-second Kyoko closed her eyes and envisioned a future where she and Makoto both were working jobs they liked (her in a bigger office, with associate detectives who could assist her and take their own cases, him at a school in a better neighborhood with better behaved students), before she reopened them to see the real world she existed in. Asking for anything to be different was asking for too much, she knew, but she’d give up so much if it meant that they both got to be happy and safe for as long as they both lived. “Someday we’ll be able to achieve bigger and bigger goals,” she slowly said, shaking the image of that larger office from her mind. “Right now, though, I think there’s no need to focus on anything that isn’t what we’re already doing. We’re moving in the right direction, I would say.”

“Right direction, yeah. One more year and then I’ll be able to become a true teacher, and from there the sky’s the limit!” Makoto sounded excited, until he realized that Kyoko had begun looking wistful as she was glancing towards her computer. “Er, you’re the one who just said we’re moving in the right direction, I thought that was a good thing.”

“It is, but has it hit you lately that we’re nearing our thirties? We’ve been wasting the prime years of our lives doing work to build for a better future. Not only that, but we didn’t even meet each other until we’d gotten into the ‘downswing’ of life, rather than being young and carefree upon first meeting.” Looking at the date in the corner of her screen, Kyoko was doing the quick mental math to know that they were definitely both in their late-20s, which felt like a damning title to be labeled with, and only getting further and further from being able to be referred to as _young_. “We are going the right way, but by the time we get to where we’re going, how much life are we going to have wasted?”

Never before in her life had she felt like things were slipping past her, and Kyoko couldn’t say that she was fond of the feeling. She’d always put work first, personal life second, but in the six months since she’d made her actual connection with Makoto, she’d noticed that she was beginning to shift her priorities mentally, even though on the outside she maintained her original stance. He seemed to not quite be on the same level as her in regards to what she was feeling, but he was being an attentive ear to what she had to say, based on how he was looking at her with an expression that told her to just keep talking.

And so, she continued to get all of her worries and concerns off of her chest, making it very clear that she wanted to become the best detective in the city, if not the country, and she wouldn’t pass up any opportunities she was given to make that happen. But at the same time, she didn’t want to miss out on living a normal life just because she had aspirations she was aiming to achieve, but she didn’t see how she could maintain a balance between the two without somebody needing to make sacrifices on her behalf; this was a problem to her because she knew that he was aspiring for great things as well and she didn’t want to saddle him with any emotional baggage or regrets. With every additional thought she let loose into the world, she felt her worries grow lighter, if only because Makoto was right there, looking just as invested in what she had to say then as he had at the start.

“I think maybe, just maybe, you’re overthinking things,” he ultimately decided once her ramblings and heart-bearing had come to their conclusion. “Kyoko, you’re so wrapped up in how things might work that you’re forgetting that they’ll work no matter what. Whatever happens to us will happen one way or another, so let’s not think about all the details we can’t control and instead think about how we’ve got each other, and that’s a lot.”

“It feels like you’re referencing something with that,” she immediately replied, to which he shrugged and gave a soft laugh. “But sure, I’ll try my best to focus on what I can control and less on what I can’t, which means if my life stagnates from this moment on, it’s because I stopped looking too hard at the future.”

“Kyoko…I’ll make you rethink those words. I don’t know how yet, but I’ll do it.” Determination in his voice, Makoto gave her hand a tight squeeze before tapping her soulmate mark (despite it being covered) and standing up to round the desk. “Right now, let’s just keep doing what we’ve been doing, and look forward to my sister’s wedding too. That’s all we need on our minds at the moment.”

She remained sitting in the chair even as he came around and crouched down to give her a hug, physical contact she didn’t shake off even though she didn’t care for it. There was just something about the kindness and affection in Makoto’s touch that put Kyoko at ease, rather than when she hugged literally anyone else that she knew. In the time since they’d started indulging each other in a relationship, she’d found herself wrapped up in his arms more times than she could count, receiving more hugs from him than she’d ever received from anyone before in her life, partially by choice and partially because her father had always been hands-off with her. It didn’t mean that she wanted to be hugged constantly, but when it came time for a quick moment like the one they were actively having, she could allow herself to relax in his arms.

When he finally let go he looked at her with a content smile on his lips, before backing away to head towards the door. She sighed, brushing the back of one hand against her shoulder where his arm had been moments before, only to see that he was taking his sweet time heading for the door, an unusual sight. “Makoto, is there something you have on your mind?” she asked, knowing too well when someone’s body language wasn’t right. “You know you are welcome to address things with me. After all, I laid all my concerns down for you.”

“I, er, do have some things on my mind but they’re not exactly things I wanna talk to you about right now, sorry about that,” he replied, stumbling over his words as his feet finally began carrying him faster. “I promise we can talk about this sometime! Just not right now!”

“An admission of some sort of guilt if I’ve ever heard one…” she muttered as he finally left the building. “But what could he be hiding from me?” Kyoko asked herself the question out loud, but her mind was already beginning to work overtime coming to the conclusion that the thing Makoto was thinking about might have been something she wanted to keep secret from herself.

* * *

The time leading up to Komaru and Toko’s wedding was rather peaceful, all things considered coming from the perspective of a homicide detective. Kyoko didn’t find herself swamped in nearly as many cases as usual, and the ones that she did get involved in were fairly simple to put together, and in all of her free time that she received because of the change in workload she found herself spending more time with Makoto than she ever had before. They still lived separate, but had plans for getting a place they could share at a midpoint between the school and her office, and their lives were coming together just as they intended for them to, no outside influence needed. He’d never come clean about what he’d left her office that day thinking about, but she had her suspicions and yet she wasn’t going to bring it up to him until he was ready for it.

At any rate, they both had their hands full with wedding-related plans that they were responsible for, and so their time together was often spent talking about what there still was that they needed to do. Makoto had been put in charge of getting the decorations ready, because he had access to an art classroom and a teacher who could get students to do the work for free, and Kyoko’s job was to learn the ins and outs of her officiant role so that she could perform it flawlessly. Neither of them were exactly confident in their ability to succeed at what they’d been asked to do without issues, but the assurances they gave each other and received from the pair of brides was enough to get them to give it their all.

When the day came nothing seemed to be too amiss, minus the strangely prominent law presence around the venue the wedding was being held at, but Kyoko surmised it was to keep them all safe rather than to cause any sort of trouble for the newlyweds. Still, she found it hard to focus on getting the brides to recite their vows and talk about their devotion when she could see the officers right outside the area. As long as they stayed out, she didn’t care what they did, though, and so the wedding was able to go off without a hitch. That changed the moment the ceremony was transitioning to its reception and she could see one of the officers waving for her to come over. “I’ll be back,” she told Makoto when she saw the hand motioning in her direction. “Whatever they’re here for, they seem to be here for me.”

He was skeptical about letting her go on her own, but when he tried to offer to go with she shut him down, allowing her to walk across the venue in her pantsuit she’d rented for the occasion. As soon as she was within reach of the officer he was trying to grab her arm, and she made sure to jump back to maintain her safety. “We need you to _hurry_ ,” the officer said, trying to reach at her again. “It’s a rather urgent matter, and every second wasted is another second that we aren’t solving this crime.”

“I’m a bit busy right now, don’t you think?” She motioned towards the wedding in progress but the officer didn’t seem to mind, and she heaved a sigh, hanging her shoulders as she began to follow the officer’s lead. “Of all the days and times for you to need me without arranging an appointment. This better be important.”

They caught up with a second officer, who handed over a stack of papers Kyoko knew to be the contents of a case file—and when she read the information at the top, she recognized it to be one she’d been working on here and there for years. “We found another scene that fits the description of the killer’s other jobs,” the second officer explained, as the first nodded along and Kyoko continued reading through the papers, familiarizing herself with the details of the case. “Since you were the detective involved in the previous investigations, we knew we had to come get you for the job, regardless of what you were doing.”

“Then it’s a good thing my work at the wedding was over, but…mind if we stop somewhere so I can change? This outfit’s a rental and I can’t afford to get it replaced if I stain it with blood.” Both officers laughed and she felt that they were just ignoring her request, but when they arrived at their unmarked car that they used to take her discreetly to crime scenes in, the backseat held a change of clothes. “Huh, did you know what I was up to in advance?”

“Saihara told us when we dropped by your office and you weren’t there. Nice guy, seemed a bit frazzled with a feuding couple in his office while we spoke, but nice guy.” The two officers gave Kyoko the privacy she needed to slip out of her rented suit and into the tags-on clothes waiting there for her. She wasn’t going to comment on how the outfit was several sizes too big, as if they’d just gone into some shop and grabbed the first thing they found, but the skirt seemed to be able to stay up on its own so she felt it would all work out. Once she’d let them know she was dressed and decent they piled into the car and off they went, them both in the front and her in the back readying herself for whatever the scene she was going to walk into would look like.

In terms of the gore and blood everywhere it ended up being rather tame, but the scent of death was strong inside the residential home, several bodies laying on the floor in a shoddily-made circle as she and the officers entered. Kyoko certainly could understand why it had been connected to the killings in the case file, because she’d seen similar setups when investigating those, but something about what she’d walked into felt different than those had been. It wasn’t the location, the killer in the other cases loved sneaking into private homes and killing the residents as well, but there was still something amiss with what she found herself walking through.

The dead giveaway that this crime scene wasn’t the work of that previous serial killer (or was showing them moving in a different direction) was when she and the officers all heard the distinct noise of someone thrashing around in the house. There was no way it was any of the corpses, Kyoko had personally checked them for pulses, and the noise seemed to be coming from somewhere nearby. They searched high and low in the room for anyone and found nothing, but Kyoko noticed that the noises got louder as she got closer to a closet between the living room where the bodies were and the kitchen. Motioning for the officers to grab their weapons just in case, she crept towards the closet, opening it and seeing a familiar body fall out, arms and mouth both bound.

It took a moment for Kyoko’s eyes to fully grasp what she was seeing, and over the calls from the officers for her to be careful she crouched down and rather roughly ripped the tape off of the woman’s mouth. “Fina-fucking-ly someone comes in here and lets me out!” Miu snapped, huffing and wheezing as she was able to properly breathe. “What happened in here? Last I saw the guy was shoving me in for ‘safekeeping’, but clearly it wasn’t keeping anyone safe!”

“Miu, are you aware that this is a crime scene? Multiple people were murdered here today.” The fact that Miu, of all the people in the world, was the one who had been found alive in such a place made Kyoko incredibly curious about what had been happening before the killings started, but she knew that they may have lucked out on who they found alive. “I think you’ll need to explain what you know about what was going on here, regardless of if you knew people died or not.”

“Hell yeah I know people died here, I heard the whole damn thing in the closet!” She was struggling to rip her arms out of the ropes that bound them, and it took the two officers dropping their guns and working to untie the knots to let her free, and once her arms were available to her she was rotating her wrists, making sure she could move. “Look, I can and will tell you every single thing I know about what happened here, but Miu Iruma, woman genius, doesn’t spill information without a price.”

Kyoko gave a pleading look at the officers, wordlessly asking them to stay out of things vocally because she knew the ins and outs of Miu’s particular demands. “I cannot promise you your girlfriend back, no matter how much you beg me to,” she said, hearing Miu groan at the denial, “but I can tell you that refusing to comply with our demands can earn you jail time for being disobedient and potentially tampering with a crime scene. Is that what you want to come from this today?”

“W-well no, but you should at least _try_ to convince her that I’m better than that dork she’s with. Can’t you do that for me?” The stern glare that overtook Kyoko’s visage made Miu flinch, babbling a few words before sighing. “Okay, okay, you want to know what happened here, so I’ll tell you. You know who lived here, don’t you?”

Within just a few moments, Kyoko and the officers learned that the home they stood in belonged to the professor responsible for the robot Miu frequently borrowed, and that he had been renting it out to a small family who’d needed the place to stay. She claimed to have been invited over to do some repair work on one of the computers that the professor had installed in the kitchen, and it was when she’d been talking with the father of the family that the intruder had broken in; she’d been spared for some reason, bound and gagged and thrown into the closet before the gunshots had gone off. With every statement she made Kyoko made sure to take detailed notes, the officers doing the same for their own knowledge, and by the time Miu had caught them up to speed they were all certain that the murder they’d walked into wasn’t related to the ones in the case file in the slightest.

Whoever had come into the home was someone with a grudge against an innocent family, or someone who wanted the professor’s work more than Miu herself did. The second option seemed more plausible after Kyoko had her show where the computer she’d been repairing was, and when they’d entered the kitchen the entire system was ripped out of the wall. “Well, that should make locating whoever did this much easier,” Kyoko mused, while Miu ran to the gaping hole in the wall, lamenting the loss of the device she’d been working on just hours before. “I can’t assume that many people would be in this town with kitchen control computers.”

“What are you talking about? That computer was a database that the professor had put together about soulmate research,” Miu replied, pulling her goggles off the top of her head to cover her eyes with them, so she could shove her head into the remaining hole to look around. “He’d kept it here because it seemed safe to have an inaccessible database in an unsuspecting home, but guess he was wrong about the whole damn thing! He’s going to be furious when he finds out this happened, and he’s never going to let me borrow Kiibo again because of this and…”

“Soulmate research. That’s almost as easy to locate, if not easier. How many individuals in this town, much less the world, would know much about that topic?” Turning to the officers, Kyoko decided she had enough to give them all a lead to work off of, and so she imparted her wisdom on the pair. “Search the area for anyone casually strolling with computer parts, see if neighbors have cameras to refer to, it can’t be that difficult to find the culprit this time. Whatever they were doing, they came to the wrong place to do it.”

Both seemed to take her decision and run with it, directing their fellow officers who had been dispatched for the cause to do whatever they could to help bring the dead the justice they deserved. They didn’t get involved on their own, however, because they knew that their job in that moment was going to be something different: taking Kyoko back to where they’d picked her up from, and getting Miu down to the station to get more information from her. That was one of the more awkward rides in the backseat of an unmarked police car that Kyoko had ever had, needing to dodge questions about why she had a pantsuit in the back seat with her and why she wasn’t getting taken home or even to her office, but once she was dropped back off at the venue with her rental in hand, she had faith that everything was going to work out as it needed to.

She was greeted upon her return by her dear boyfriend, who most certainly should not have been waiting for her to come back the whole time she’d been gone, yet looked like he’d followed her as far as he could have and then stopped, watching for when she showed up once more. “Important business?” Makoto asked, looking at her ill-fitting outfit that she’d been unable to change out of. “Want to tell me about it now, or later?”

“It’s nothing that should be being discussed at a wedding,” she replied with a soft smile, “out of respect of the brides. Why, if I hadn’t known that Toko was _here_ , I might have suspected for a moment that she had something to do with this murder I just walked into the aftermath of. Alas, I know she’s completely innocent.”

“Innocent, and also long gone.” The words came as if they were a strike to Kyoko’s face, stinging her cheek much like a slap would have, and Makoto continued to explain. “They left a while ago, because the reception was getting boring and they had better places to be. You’ll probably be hearing a lot about that from her and Komaru both next time you see them.”

“I suppose I will, but they’ll understand that solving murders comes first before anything.”

She locked eyes with Makoto, expecting to see him following along with her sentiment, but meeting a gaze that looked rather disappointed with the stance instead. “If that’s how you want to approach things, then I really hope that no one gets killed during your own wedding, because I don’t think I’d be able to explain to everyone why you’ve disappeared.”

“O-oh, Makoto, you’re not implying what I think you’re implying, are you?” Kyoko hadn’t thought much about how her own proposal would go, but she never expected it to be in such an off-the-cuff manner—and when he shrugged she knew that it wasn’t meant to be in that moment after all. “Very well, whenever I happen to get married and you just happen to be there, I’ll make sure no other detectives are available to rat out my location to the police. The city can go without a physical presence investigating a crime scene for a few hours.”

Since there wasn’t much for them to do there any longer, they decided to walk back to her office together, where she’d originally changed into her wedding outfit earlier that day. Their trip took them past the burned-out husk of the old library, the place where so many questions had been asked and others had been answered, somewhere that she found herself feeling a bit of a connection to. Outside the crumbling façade was a sign noting that there would be demolition of the remaining part of the building within the month, which had been drawn over with several graffiti hearts and a clown face, under which the words _I’m back_ were written.

Kyoko couldn’t help but smile at the sight and grabbed Makoto’s hand in her own, pressing the palm, where the portion of her soulmate mark that should have carried his eye color was burned from her skin, against his. “In my line of work, happy endings are bittersweet,” she mused as they passed the sign, “but our story isn’t a tragedy, and we’ll work with the ashes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaaaaaaaaaa this fic's rather short for my "long fic" standards but I love every inch of it. being tasked with writing a soulmate AU was fun enough, but I infused some mystery elements into it and some just overall Fun Stuff to make it a good time. I really hope everyone enjoyed reading this~


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